Why are consistent 0% accept rate users not punished?

Question

There's quite a number of consistent offenders that cannot bring themselves to marking answers as accepted.

I personally always comment on that and do NOT answer the question, regardless how trivial it is.

The reason why these users don't change their ways is because to some SO'ers, rep is everything, so clearly, just displaying the accept rate is not working.

There really should be a mechanism where if you have lower than say 5% accept rate for x amount of questions over y amount of time, there is some kind of associated 'punishment'.

Few options:

• You cannot post a question, until your accept rate improves above the set threshold.
• Question can be posted, but no one can supply an answer yet until accept rate improves.
• Question can only be answered by SO'ers with say < 300 rep, so these new comers get an additional benefit to catch-up on some rep.

Does anyone have any other ideas on this?

Answer 1

When you find a question that has been asked by a user with a 0% accept rate, post the following comment to his question:

Consider accepting answers on some of your questions. You can do this by clicking the checkmark next to the correct answer in each question.

This clarifies:

1. The community generally expects this kind of involvement,
2. How to do it for new users.

Answer 2

I think you're taking this way too personally, and the idea of restricting those who can ask questions goes against everything these sites were set up for.

But anyways, let me answer your question with some questions. Is it possible that:

• A user legitimately doesn't know how to use the rep system?
• A user legitimately doesn't care about the rep system?
• Even with an accept rate of 0%, the user is still providing value to the community?

Answer 3

I flagged Gaspar's "you are a bad person and you should feel bad" comment as offensive (there's no call for that). But I do agree w/those saying that the downvotes are mostly indicative that you're not enjoying the Q&A for its own sake. If you're worrying too much about "points" and "punishment" then it's just not going to be a good experience for you or anyone else.

Remember that these questions aren't just serving the people who ask them. They are serving people who use search engines and find the content while looking for answers to similar questions. You may be frustrated by people who don't close questions but ask new ones, but I'd find it more frustrating if site content was hidden from me or I was unable to answer if I wanted to.

The reputation system is just a heuristic to automate moderation privileges. Accept rate and points are shown next to questioner's avatars so each answerer can make their own decisions about such policies. Moreover, you can click through to see the questions someone has answered to decide if the basis of their reputation is meaningful to you or not.

But as a meta-meta-stackoverflow comment: don't let the internets get to you. These sites are open to everyone, and it's largely an anarchy beyond your control. I'd be more amused if I got a -100 question than feel my life was under attack. :)

Answer 4

I posed a similar question awhile ago here and also got downvoted into oblivion. My idea was to tax the unaccepted questions with rep that eventually gets returned when the answer is accepted. It would probably a pain to implement and highly subjective because one can never know if the answer worked for the author.

It would be interesting to see some sort of automatic bounty system for the old, unaccepted questions (perhaps requiring that the automatically accepted answer have at least 5 upvotes). If anything, it may drive encourage more people to see the question (new members since the date it was posted) or those with 3K+ rep to close it.

For those who wish to downvote my previous question some more, here it is:
Should questions with no accepted answers be charged "interest" after awhile?

Answer 5

I'm having a hard time deciding whether to join the party on the comment chains or post an answer, but, what the heck.

There is a good reason, oh @Gaspar, to encourage accepts, and it isn't related to rep-farming. The site highlights unaccepted questions. There's a model here in which, until a question gets an accepted answer, the site assumes that none of the answers have met the questioners needs.

So I find myself in favor of gentle reminders, but not in favor of draconian solutions like the OP's question or some of the snarkier nudges I've seen.

I would also point out that there is sometimes a positive correlation between zero accepts and 'plz send me the codez' questions, so I have some sympathy for people who post more, ahem, strident responses to someone who has posted 40 questions, accepted no answers, and is posting yet another question asking this community to do their work for them.